A Showstopping Carnival of Art Heats Up the City

Many exhibitions in the city this fall, chief among them the Guggenheim mothership's big survey, "Brazil: Body and Soul," should add to Brazil's mystique as a land of sensuality, excess, physicality, and carnivalesque extremes. Ranging across four centuries of this country's complex multiculture, it has a showstopping opener: an enormous (and enormously elaborate) baroque altarpiece, from a monastery in the Amazonian northeast, that should give Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda a run for the money. Larger than most Manhattan apartments, the structure measures a humongous 40 by 30 by 15 feet.

Ranging from feather capes by indigenous artists to Ernesto Neto's spicy amorphous panty-hose installation work, and from Afro-Brazilian slave jewelry and ritual objects to the tropical modernist works of the 1920s (such as that of Tarsila do Amaral, whose 1929 painting, Anthropophagy, tweaks Picasso and Rousseau) as well as the radical experimental oeuvres of the 1960s, "Brazil: Body and Soul" promises to be a vast and unwieldy blockbuster. But presenting grand, preposterous, and sometimes compromised visions is the Guggenheim's forte. This omnivorous exhibition could be an enlightening initiation into the constants, variables, and parameters of the Brazilian sensibility, orwho knowsa revelation that there is no single such thing.

"O Fio da Trama/The Thread Unraveled: Contemporary Brazilian Art" at El Museo del Barrio (October 12- January 31, 1230 Fifth Avenue, 831-7272) picks up where the Gugg's exhibition leaves off. With nearly 50 drawings, sculptures, photographs, and installations done during the past decade by some 20 younger and newer Brazilian artistssome showing in New York for the first timeEl Museo del Barrio brings the Guggenheim survey up to date and counters its grandiose, scattershot approach by concentrating on a single connective theme. Focusing on pieces that use thread or fabric, this exhibition makes the point that in the work of many Brazilian artists, sewing, weaving, and embroidery are more than crafty techniques: They're flexible metaphors for society.

courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim

Tarsila Do Amarals Anthropophagy

If that isn't enough, a few Chelsea galleries get into the spirit by showing Brazilian artists this fall. Miguel Rio Branco, whose photographs are at the Gugg, shows an installation with slide projections and sound, titled "Between the Eyes, the Desert," at D'Amelio Terras (October 13-November 10, 525 West 22nd Street, 352-9460). São Paulo native Jac Leirner, whose elegantly minimal calling-card works have to do not only with identity but with her globe-hopping, equator-crossing, peripatetic life, alights at Brent Sikkema (October 20-November 17, 530 West 22nd Street, 929-2262). And Valeska Soares does an installation about borders and infinite space at Liebman Magnan (November 6-December 29, 552 West 24th Street, 255-3225).

And just in case you haven't guessed the ulterior motives behind this Brazilian extravaganza, here's a clue: The multinational McGugg hopes to open one or more branches in Brazil.

This show offers 37 new paintingsboth abstract and representationalby the East German-born art star who back in the early '60s rejected socialist realism, dreamed up "capitalist realism," and (influenced by American pop art) decided to "paint a photo." The rest is history.

Her fermenting sugarcane tunnel installation was the hit of the Havana Bienal, even though it only lasted one day. Here the Cuban artist performs eight gestures that have to do with being silenced in a sound and video installation.

Donna Nield creates an indoor tornado, Lisa Hein wraps an upside-down drainage system around the building, and 20 others respond in various ways to the raw industrial space near P.S.1 that will become the Sculpture Center's new home.

Hammond's zany paintings, based on a lexicon of found images, inaugurate Lelong's new ground-floor Chelsea space. "From Avatar to Zed" consists of the final dozen paintings based on titles provided by John Ashbery.

"O2 = 03: Fractured Oxygen = Ozone" is the title of this show of Sonnier's selected work from 1990 to 1997. Inspired by Tesla's experiments with electricity, The Tesla Wall and other pieces electrify the exhibition space with sparkling light and crackling sound.

Exploring representations of women in India's calendar art, this exhibition could be an intriguing investigation of cultural issues at the intersection of the sacred and secular. Or it could just be a fine display of high kitsch.

'ART IN GENERAL ON CANAL (PART 1)' October 9-February 28Canal Street between Chinatown and the West Side Pier, 219-0473

If you're alert next time you shop for supplies, you might spot work by Matthew Bakkom, Gustavo Artigas, Gelatin, Godzilla Asian American Art Network, and Sontext on manholes or street signs or in a bank, shop window, or at other sites across Canal Street.

Brainard, a proto-pop maverick who rarely showed in public after 1979, has a retrospective at P.S.1 (opens September 30). More of his smart, witty, contrarian assemblages, paintings, drawings, and collages are here.

Finally, a substantial museum show of this witty para-conceptualist's irresistibly insubstantial work, made of anything from sugar cubes or spaghetti to elaborately cut paper, a single aspirin, or a bit of dust.

Specially commissioned works by 18 artists celebrate the demise of the world's biggest garbage dump, one of the largest manmade structures in the world. Mark Dion, Rackstraw Downes, Jussi Heikkilä, and, of course, Mierle Ukeles are among them.

Two enormous new canvases and studies for them by a painter who looks less klutzy and more canny by the minute. His small works are at the Whitney (September 21-December 2) and the Philip Morris Whitney (December 5-January 4). The complete woodcuts and linocuts are at Peter Blum, 99 Wooster Street, 343-0441 (September 20-November 3).